Felix Nadar was a giant in all meanings of the word. The French artist had bright red hair, a tremendous mustache, and was so tall that he loomed over all his contemporaries. The top hat he wore accentuated his height. His success as a cartoonist, photographer, balloonist, and early flight innovator kept the public’s attention on him throughout the mid-1800s in Paris.
As a youth, he was one of the down and out young artists struggling to survive in Paris, as represented in Puccini’s La Boheme. (He was friends with the author of the book the opera was based on.) From early on, he was known for his flamboyance. (According to legend, he and a companion spent so long testing the qualities of oysters as an aphrodisiac, they became stranded on their mattress in a sea of shells that filled the rest of the room.)
His caricatures of cultural and political celebrities were what first brought him an audience. His likenesses of actors, painters, poets, and legislators were uncanny, but it was his remarkable ability to poke fun at his subjects respectfully that won him a following. During the reign of Emperor Napoleon III, slander and any form of political dissent were heavily policed. Before Nadar could publish a likeness, he needed the consent of his target. In his way, he was the Don Rickles of his time; many considered it an honor to be insulted by him.
A fascination with early photography turned Felix Nadar into a pioneer of the craft. Before becoming a portrait artist of great renown, he photographed the first images ever lit by artificial means. Deep underground in the sewers of Paris, he set up lights to capture macabre scenes in the blackness. Combining a passion for balloon flight, Nadar later took the first aerial photographs high over Paris.
His passion for flight led him to build successively larger balloons, until he eventually built “The Giant.” The balloon was as large as a city block, and underneath hung a small wicker house, which included a kitchen, dining room, study and darkroom. The first flight was a magnificent success with guests delighting in the view from the house’s rooftop deck. The second flight ended in total disaster as a freak wind swept the balloon and house across Belgian farmlands, nearly colliding with an oncoming train. Luckily, broken bones and a (temporarily) shattered ego were the only casualties.
All of these stages in his career were recounted in a recent biography (The Great Nadar by Adam Begley), but the book strangely only hinted at what I see as his greatest feat: instituting the first air mail system.
In many ways, the hero of my novel, The Agent and the Aeronaut, isn’t really either of the two title characters. Though they are the protagonists we follow through their harrowing odyssey, their story is more about contending with catastrophic failure. Though the French ultimately lost the war, Nadar’s contribution to the resistance was one of the few undeniable highlights.
Initially, when war broke out against the Prussians in the summer of 1870, to serve the cause Felix Nadar hoped to interest the military in using photographers to monitor enemy positions outside the city from tethered balloons. When the army said they weren’t interested, and then, later, the Prussian siege of the city made aerial surveillance moot, he had another idea.
Along with being cut off from provisions like food and fuel, a chief point of suffering for this international city was to be cut off from all communications with the outside world. Telegraph lines were cut, roads blocked, and the river closely monitored. Nadar suggested sending out piloted balloons with sacks of mail. If the winds were in the right direction, the balloons could sail over enemy lines and land in friendly territory.
The flights out of Paris proved a tremendous success—not just because mail was finally reaching the outside world about the horrendous situation inside the walls of Paris, but because the balloon flights infuriated the Prussians. Each flight had the name of some French hero painted in giant letters across the inflated canvas, and the pilots rained down anti-Prussian propaganda from their gondolas.
Not all flights made it through the blockade. Some were swept into enemy lines and captured. Others went out to sea, never to be heard of again. But quickly, another major problem with the system arose. Paris could not receive any reply to their messages. Return flights were attempted, but it was impossible to steer the hot air balloons.
Nadar (with the help of others) came up with an ingenious solution.
Carrier pigeons had been sent out with the earliest flights to return with responses to high level queries. Army generals would get replies to their mail, in notes attached to the bird’s leg or tail feather. But there weren’t enough birds for everyone else. And so, microfilm was invented.
Hundreds of messages on tiny cards could be photographed pinned to a wall. The resulting film with the image was then attached to the bird’s leg, who flew home to Paris. When the piece of film was projected onto a wall in the besieged city, scribes could view and copy down the messages from the photographed cards.
The war lasted through the coldest winter on record until the city eventually surrendered. The internal fighting and civil war that followed that spring was devastating, resulting in tens of thousands dying, many of them the poor left inside the city. The tragedy of the Paris in 1871 is difficult to comprehend, but a cast of inspirational characters faced the bloodshed bravely and in ways that are perhaps even more incredible than the ruinous results of war. Nadar was one of those people, and it was a delight to include him in my novel.
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